Pigment Coloring Book App for Grayscale Coloring Pages

If you fancy coloring your grayscale coloring pages digitally rather than using traditional pencils and paper, the Pigment Coloring Book App is well worth a look!

The Pigment coloring app is different to a lot of other coloring apps available because it offers freehand coloring. This means that instead of simply flood filling an image (this is where you click on a segment and the whole segment gets filled with color – you have to color within the lines), the Pigment app has a feature called ‘Freehand Coloring Mode’ which enables the colorist to color over the lines. The image below shows why being able to color over the lines is important for grayscale coloring:

As you can see in the image above, with traditional coloring, a space is just filled with color, however with grayscale color, we need the ability to color over the image where ever we need to add color – and we can do this in Pigment using the Freehand Coloring Mode which is an option when you import a grayscale coloring page to color.

Import Your Own Images into Pigment Coloring App

You can use the ‘Import’ feature in the Pigment coloring app to import your own coloring pages. This is an option that you have with the premium paid-for service and using the free service, you can upload a limited number of pages to color freehand.

You can import JPEG and PNG files, which means you can upload most coloring pages. You can upload any Lady Grayscale coloring page into the Pigment app.

Coloring Grayscale Coloring Pages Using the Pigment App

You will see that the Pigment coloring app has a range of different coloring brushes you can use. Some of these are only available with the premium service, however, personally I have found the brushes available with the free service perfectly fine for coloring grayscale images. Each of these brushes will give a different effect and you can alter these further by using the opacity and size slider. This will allow you to make the brushes more or less transparent as well as vary the size from tiny, which is great for fine detail through to a large brush which is good for coloring large spaces.

A level of transparency is built into each option so the gray shades come through the color which adds the dimension and depth to the grayscale page (which, afterall, is what grayscale coloring is all about 🙂 )

The Pigment coloring app also features a range of ready-made color pallets. These have been created to give you a set of colors to work with that complement each other, so you don’t need to worry about spoiling the finished effect by adding a color that clashes. The color pallets are given names that help to conjure up the feel of each color group, such as ‘Winter Wonderland’ and ‘Falling Leaves’. With names like this you immediately get a feel for the color pallet and how it could be used. Shades of colors are also grouped together and there is a skin tone pallet.

The color slider at the bottom of the page allows each color to be darkened or lightened which gives yet more flexibility. And if you forget what color you last used, the recent color pallet at the bottom of the pallet page is a useful way to get to colors you’ve already used – particularly handy if you have lightened or darkened a standard color to create a custom color.

The use of gestures allows artists to zoom in and out of the work area. This is really helpful for when you want to be precise with the addition of color as I have done in the photo below. Also, see how the lighter color in the pattern has come through the background.

And another neat feature is that you can turn the canvas around just as you would a coloring page or coloring book.

The combination of different transparency levels, different depth in colors as well as various size brushes means that you can quickly color large backgrounds, as well as create fine detail as these hairs on this little bear.

The Pigment coloring app is available for both Apple and Android devices. It offers support for the Apple pencil stylus, however I use it using just my finger (which is my preferred way of coloring digitally) with great effects.